First look: The Foreign Affairs redesign

12/19/12 5:01 AM EST

The redesigned January/February 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Foreign Affairs, the 90-year-old magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations, is getting a makeover.

As part of an effort to expand its appeal beyond the foreign policy establishment, every issue of Foreign Affairs will now feature a photograph on the cover and an extensive interview with a leading newsmaker.

"It's time to showcase our wares to a larger audience," said Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose, who gave POLITICO an exclusive first look at the inaugural issue of the redesign. "We had to move beyond our wonky, quarterly appeal. So we decided to put our very nice wine in an appropriately classy bottle."

The January/February issue, titled "Can America Be Fixed?," will feature a photograph of the Statue of Liberty undergoing renovation, highlighting essays by former Foreign Affairs editor Fareed Zakaria, now of Time and CNN, and Roger Altman, the investment banker and former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. The first interview is with Abdullah Gul, the President of Turkey. A later issue will feature an interview with retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Foreign Affairs has provided a forum for the most influential voices in the establishment for nine decades -- from Elihu Root's "Requisite for the Success of Popular Diplomacy" to George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" to Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" -- but Rose wants to make sure its seen as an accessible magazine for the savvy and well-read, rather than a stale academic journal reserved for experts.

"If you read The New Yorker or The Economist, if you watch Charlie Rose or listen to NPR -- we want people who don't yet realize it to know that we should be part of a general interest media diet. It's not just for wonks or professionals," Rose told POLITICO. "So we went with a photo-cover to stand out on the newsstands -- to give it a cleaner, crisper look."

But neither the magazine's editorial quality nor the journal-like length will be compromised, Rose promised. "We're a classy product. We didn't want to do anything cheap, tawdry or meretricious, anything that smacked of dumbing down. We knew our aduience would be very upset."

That audience is already growing, according to Rose, who says the magazine now has 175,000 total paid circulation. (The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a circulation of 160,000 as of June 30.)

Rose says that despite industry-wide struggles, Foreign Affairs is undergoing this change from a position of strength, not weakness.

"We're already a pretty large and popular publication," he said. "We just felt, let's take it to the next level and stop hiding our light under a barrel."